Been a while since I’ve blogged here, going to try to do so more often!  For quite a while now in the CoreOS group at Red Hat I’ve been part of a team working to create RHEL CoreOS, the cluster-managed operating system that forms a base of the just-released OpenShift 4.

With OpenShift 4 and RHEL CoreOS, we have created a project called machine-config-operator – but I like to think of it as the “RHEL CoreOS operator”.  This is a fusion of technologies that came from the CoreOS acquisition (Container Linux, Tectonic) along with parts of RHEL Atomic Host, but with a lot of brand new code as well.

What the MCO (machine-config-operator) does is pair with RHEL CoreOS to manage operating system updates as well as configuration in a way that makes the OS feel like a Kubernetes component.

This is a radically different approach than the OpenShift 3.x days, where the mental model was to provision + configure the OS (and container runtime), then provision a cluster on top.   With OpenShift 4 using RHCOS and the MCO, the cluster controls the OS.

If you haven’t yet, I encourage you to dive right in and play around with some of the example commands from the docs as well as examples from the upstream repository.  There is also my Devconf.cz 2019 talk (slightly dated now).

The release of 4.1 of course is just a beginning – there’s a whole lot more to do to bridge the worlds of the “traditional” operating system and Kubernetes/OpenShift.  For example, in git master of the MCO (for the next release after 4.1) we landed support for kernel arguments.  I think it’s quite cool to be able to e.g. oc edit machineconfig/50-nosmt, change the KernelArguments field in the MachineConfig CRD, add e.g. nosmt (or any other karg) and watch that change incrementally roll out across the cluster, reconciling the OS state just like any other Kubernetes object.

The links above have lots more detail for those interested in learning more – I’ll just link again operating system updates as I think that one is particularly interesting.

This release of OpenShift 4.1 is laying a powerful new foundation for things to come, and I’m really proud of what the teams have accomplished!